“Main thing is to keep on good terms with them,” Charles went on blithely.
Indignation burned through her like spilled kerosene. She could not hear a word he was saying until “band of the screeching dev—”
Her head snapped up. Caroline pressed her lips together and jerked her chin at him. The straighter she tried to hold herself, the harder she trembled.
“Come on, Mary and Laura!” Charles said. His voice was so bright, it sounded as if the words had been whitewashed. “We’ll skin that rabbit and dress the prairie hens while that cornbread bakes. Hurry! I’m hungry as a wolf!”
Caroline sank down on a crate. There was nothing to do but collect herself. With the heels of her hands she slicked the perspiration from her temples into her hair. She heard Charles peg the rabbit’s leg to the wall, then begin peeling the skin from the flesh while Mary and Laura pelted him with chatter about the Indians’ visit.
Her ears followed only the ripples of their talk, until Charles’s voice came down like the ax. “Did you girls even think of turning Jack loose?” Each syllable struck the same low note.
A spike of fear fell straight to Caroline’s heels. What might she have done, had Jack come raging into the cabin? Likely stand by and watch the Indians kill the dog. That or shoot Jack herself.
Until this moment she had not thought about the revolver. What would the Osage men have done, as she drew the pistol and cocked it? Caroline began to tremble again. There was nothing she could use to protect herself or her daughters without inviting attack.
“There would have been trouble,” Charles was saying. “Bad trouble.”
There. He had said it, at least. But now the acknowledgment left her reeling. She listened to Charles reproach the girls and wished she could snatch his words from the air. That he should have been so cavalier with her, yet so grave with Mary and Laura was nonsensical. In Pepin they had been safe as buttons in the button box. Surely he could not expect them to comprehend the hazards of the Indian Territory.
“Do as you’re told and no harm will come to you,” Charles declared.
One objection after another crowded Caroline’s throat. The girls did not understand. She could hear it in the shrink of their voices even as they whispered, “Yes, Pa.” They were bewildered by his anger, and that was all.
Charles had not seen their fear, Caroline reminded herself. He had not felt Mary’s tears soaking his sleeve, nor watched Laura try to press herself invisible behind the stack of slabs. He had only seen them boiling over in their eagerness to share the news of their encounter with the Osages.
But he was turning them in the wrong direction. They had not set the bulldog loose, and they had not been wrong to be afraid of the Indians, nor to want to protect her. Instead of being reproached, they ought to be praised for following their instincts. In a place like this, there could be no room for blind obedience. It was all the more dangerous to render them more wary of upsetting their pa than of the Indians. Their fear would guard them—if only Charles would leave them free to obey it.
Caroline swallowed all her protests back. She could not interject. Contradicting Charles would only muddy the girls further. She rose and went to the window for a breath of air. Alongside the woodpile, Charles had one of the prairie hens pinned by the wings under his boots. He pulled slowly upward on the thighs so that the bird began to stretch apart. The feathers shuddered, then the whole of the body tore free to leave the breast, pink and glistening, between the crushed wings.
Charles nailed the provisions cupboard to the wall, to keep the Indians from making off with the whole thing. Caroline’s shoulders flinched with every smack of the hammer. She could hold her thoughts in check or her body, not both. If she felt entitled to her anger, she might have turned it loose, but she did not. The fact that Charles had devoted the very next morning to building a cupboard complete with a padlock proved that he shared her concern over their supplies. But he would not say it. Caroline did not know why she needed him to; it was plain enough.
In went the cornmeal, the sugar and flour, coffee and tea. Charles flapped the lid shut and threaded a padlock through the slots he’d whittled into the wood. “There,” he said, and held out the key. “String that up on a shoelace or what have you and wear it where the Indians won’t see it.”
“Wear it?” Caroline said.
Charles nodded. “That way if they take it into their heads to search the place, they won’t find it.”
Caroline stepped back. She could just imagine standing by with that key dangling between her breasts while those bare brown men rooted through the cabin. “You keep it, Charles,” she said.
“No sense in you having to fetch the key from me three times a day to do your cooking.” He gave the key a little toss, fumbling to catch it when she did not. “All right?” he asked.
“That stands to reason,” she said, and reluctantly put out her hand to accept it.
Caroline went to her work basket and retrieved a spool of red crochet cotton. If she was to wear the thing, it would not be on a scrap of shoelace. Then again, she thought, it must not be so fancy as to attract attention. So she worked an ordinary chain stitch with her crochet hook until the string of red loops was long enough to let the key lie securely behind the steel boning of her corset.
It would be a lie, to put herself between the Osages and the cupboard with the key around her neck, pretending to be unable to unlock it. How much easier on her conscience to simply put down her foot and refuse. Then again, she did not want to provoke them—only thwart them. So a lie it would be.
The first few days she constantly felt the scant weight of the key around her neck, felt it nudging her ribs when she bent or leaned just so. Even after she became insensible to the press of the cool metal teeth against her flesh, the brass left a faint green print like a brand on her skin.
Nineteen
How often the world seemed to bend for Charles, Caroline thought as she watched him crank the windlass, in a way it did for no one else. When they were mired along the Missouri, Mr. Jacobs had ridden up out of the trees to trade horses. The log fell on her ankle, and along came Edwards to finish raising the cabin and stable. Even the ride that had ended with Charles’s terrifying encounter with the wolf pack had brought them, in a roundabout way, the man who now shoveled at the bottom of their half-dug well.
He was a round, squinting fellow, his fair skin scoured to peeling by the sun. No shirker, though, for every morning at sunup Mr. Scott was at the door, calling out, “Hi, Ingalls! Let’s go!”